How Mindfulness Can Help Your Brain Manage Pain

Although medications and, at times, surgical and other interventions can be important tools for pain management, too often they fail to completely relieve pain. Furthermore, drugs and procedures do not directly impact how people cope with symptoms that may not be curable.

How does mindfulness help with pain and coping?

Pain is a brain-centered experience in that our brains control how we experience any sensory input from our nervous system. In other words, without a brain, we could not “interpret” pain as such.

There is considerable overlap between the structures in the brain that process pain and those that process the emotional experience of pain, its degree of severity, and the meaning we give to pain and how well we cope with it. So our emotions and thoughts about pain can either improve or worsen the experience of it (which is good news and bad).

Mindfulness is a simple practice that has been shown to change the activity in areas of the brain that process pain severity and unpleasantness, improving both.